Note 411 — Chapter III

Ib., xxxvi, 1902, pp. 154-5. The chronology of the peculiar chambered cairns of South-Western Scotland is somewhat perplexing. On the one hand the structure of the cairns is presumptive evidence that they were built in neolithic times (J. Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times,—the Bronze and Stone Ages, pp. 271-2; Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., xxxvi, 1902, p. 136); the successive interments which were made in them were characteristic of the same period (ib., p. 134); the pottery which they contained is almost all of neolithic type (ib., pp. 165-7; xxxviii, 1904, pp. 78-9); and the presence of drinking-cups does not necessarily point to a later date (p. 193, infra). On the other hand a perforated stone hammer, which was found in one of the chambers (ib., xxxvi, 1902, p. 100), belongs to a class of implements which in this country were generally post-neolithic (p. 78, supra); an elegant bowl which was obtained by Canon Greenwell in a cairn on Largie Farm, near Crinan (Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., xxxvi, 1902, pp. 165-7), although neolithic in form, is somewhat similar to a food-vessel figured in Brit. Barrows, p. 88, fig. 73, which, like it, is ornamented with vertical flutings; and one of the drinking-cups deposited in the same cairn is ‘almost identical in size, shape, and ornamentation’ with a specimen that was associated with a bronze dagger in a barrow on Roundway Hill, Wiltshire (Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vi, 1867, pp. 345, n. 1, 347). I conclude that these cairns were locally of neolithic age, but that the influence of the later culture had made itself felt in the district,—in short, that they belonged to a period of transition.